By Dan Ambrose: Floyd Mayweather Jr. is looking to put together a tremendous undercard for his next fight on September 12th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. While Mayweather could be facing either Karim Mayfield or Andre Berto in the headliner bout, he wants to have Adrien Broner (30-2, 22 KOs) fight Shawn Porter (26-1-1, 16 KOs) on the undercard, as well as unbeaten #8 WBA welterweight contender Errol Spence (17-0, 14 KOs) challenge for the title against undefeated WBA 147 pound champion Keith Thurman (25-0, 21 KOs).
If Mayweather can setup this card, it would arguably be a far better card than Mayweather’s fight card against Manny Pacquiao last May. The feature bout between Mayweather and Mayfield or Berto obviously wouldn’t be much to talk about, but the Broner-Porter 2 and Spence-Thurman fights would more than make up for the mismatch in the main event.
“Absolutely! 100% serious [about Mayweather fighting Mayfield or Berto]. “We’re looking forward to Keith Thurman fighting Errol Spence on my undercard in September,” Mayweather said to Fighthype.com. “We have to do the Broner and Shawn Porter part 2, the rematch.”
Mayweather wants to give Broner a shot at redeeming himself against Porter, which I think would be a bad idea given how poor Broner looked against him last Saturday. Broner would be better off fixing his fighting style against lesser opposition before fighting Porter in a rematch so soon. Mayweather would like to have Broner fight Porter first followed by Errol Spence facing Porter after that. I’d personally like to see Errol Spence go straight to a fight against Broner rather than facing Porter or Thurman. It would be interesting to see how Broner would do against a slugger like Spence.
Porter’s dad, Ken Porter, said that he had to stop a sparring session between Spence and Broner back when Spence was an amateur after Spence knocked Broner silly. Ken says that Broner was out on his feet, staggering around the ring after Spence nailed him with a right-left combination to the head. Although Broner wanted to continue sparring, they weren’t going to let him given the way he was staggering around the ring. Ken said that Broner wouldn’t leave the ring and he started crying. At the time, Broner was already a world champion.
“Errol Spence already communicated. He wants to fight Keith Thurman first and then he wants to fight Shawn Porter next,” Mayweather said. “Errol Spence said it himself; he feels that Keith Thurman is scared.”
Neither Thurman nor Porter have expressed interest in wanting to fight on Mayweather’s next undercard. Thurman has been silent on the subject, whereas Porter outright refused. He said that he wants Mayweather, and he’s not interested in fighting on anymore of his undercards.
Porter said that at the post-fight press conference last Saturday. Of course, money talks, and if Mayweather can offer him enough money, I think he’d take the rematch with Broner, but it’s going to take some fairly big money to get Porter agree. Mayweather can obviously get Thurman as well if he offers him enough money, but I don’t know it’s going to balance out with a big chunk of change going to Broner, Thurman and Porter on the card. Mayweather Promotions has deep pockets though and they can definitely create a card like this.
If Mayweather can put cards like this together for his Mayweather Promotions cards, he’s going to turn that company into a huge rival for the other top promotional companies like Top Rank and Golden Boy Promotions. They just need to lure some more of the big stars and they’ll do really well in the future.
Broner lost to Porter by the scores of 114-112, 118-108 and 115-111. It’s pretty clear that Broner will need to throw more punches in the rematch with Porter if he wants to have a chance of beating him. Broner only averaged 26 punches thrown per round against Porter last Saturday. He’s going to need to throw a lot more punches in the rematch to have a chance of winning.
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